Netflix subscribers are clearly in the mood for feel-good titles — and Christmas films, especially — based on the composition of the latest global Top 10 Netflix movies list, one of four streaming performance charts that the company updates once a week.
Five of the ten movies on this week’s list, in point of fact, are Christmas-themed movies, and one of them (I Believe in Santa) garnered so much viewership across Netflix’s global subscriber base that it’s actually the #2 English-language movie worldwide on the streamer this week. Taking the top spot this time, meanwhile, is a reimagining of the classic story of Pinocchio, and it comes from imaginative director Guillermo del Toro.
Netflix Top 10 movies (December 12 – December 18)
Here’s the newest rundown of the Netflix movies that are among the streaming giant’s most-watched this week, based on the company’s updated Top 10 data:
- Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio — 39.3 million hours viewed
- I Believe in Santa — 19.9 million hours viewed
- Prisoners — 19 million hours viewed
- Bullet Train — 13.5 million hours viewed
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover — 11 million hours viewed
- The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari — 8.9 million hours viewed
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas — 7.5 million hours viewed
- Falling for Christmas — 6.4 million hours viewed
- Scrooge: A Christmas Carol — 5.6 million hours viewed
- The Noel Diary — 5.5 million hours viewed
#1 this week: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
As for the biggest Netflix movie in the world right now, Pinocchio is Guillermo del Toro’s 12th feature film — a spellbinding visual tour-de-force that reimagines the classic children’s story as a stop-motion musical adventure, and in many respects a return to the director’s roots.
The movie can trace its origin all the way back to del Toro’s childhood in Guadalajara, Mexico. Before he was a big-name director, he was a young boy armed with a Super 8 camera that he used to shoot his toys for what would become amateur stop-motion films. Just a few years later, he was teaching claymation classes as a teenager — and, even then, he had already begun kicking around the basis for the idea that would become his Pinocchio decades later.
“I used to teach stop motion and one of the guys in the class was infinitely better than I was at animating,” del Toro says in an interview with the streaming giant that’s included with the movie’s press material. “So I partnered with him and said, ‘Why don’t you animate and I’ll come up with the ideas?’
“It was around that time I first thought about doing Pinocchio in stop motion, but it would be more like Frankenstein — about a character thrown into the world as a blank slate to find out who he is, what he’s doing in this world, and why he exists.”
The movie finds del Toro teaming up with award-winning stop-motion legend Mark Gustafson to refresh the timeless tale from Italian writer Carlo Collodi about the wooden boy who dreams of becoming human. This version of Pinocchio marries the childlike state of wonder inherent in the visuals with some of the more mature subtext of Collodi’s original story. And the voice cast includes Gregory Mann as Pinocchio; Ewan McGregor as Cricket; David Bradley as Geppetto; Tilda Swinton as Death; and Finn Wolfhard as Candlewick.
According to Netflix’s data, Pinocchio racked up almost 40 million hours of viewing time on the platform for the 7-day period that ended on December 18.
Meanwhile, you can read more here as part of our earlier coverage about another of this week’s Top 10 movies, Bullet Train — as well as our coverage of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the atrocious, so-bad-it’s-entertaining-to-some-people Netflix Christmas movie I Believe in Santa.
